EU Smart
borders: Commission impact assessments misleading, suggests European
Parliament study07.11.2013A study produced for the European
Parliament published in late October has criticised proposal
for an EU "smart borders" system, arguing that the
Commission made a political commitment to the project in 2008
and has since "focused on 'selling' the policies at the
expense of impartially evaluating their necessity feasibility
and impact." According to the study, the impact assessments
produced by the Commission have been "designed to legitimise
the policy option already chosen by the European Commission."
[1]

In February the European
Commission published the two legislative proposals that make
up its "smart borders" package: one for an Entry/Exit
System which would "record the time and place of entry and
exit of third country nationals travelling to the EU" in
order to automatically detect "overstayers", and the
other for a Registered Traveller Programme, which would allow
the "pre-screening and vetting" of frequent travellers
to the EU, ostensibly in order to speed up their border crossings.
[2]

The Commission has since
2007 produced four impact assessments and one feasibility study
of its smart borders proposals. Impact assessments are supposed
to act as "a decision-making aid" to give the legislature
"more accurate and better structured information on the
positive and negative impacts" of legislative proposals
"but not taking the place of political judgment".

But its most recent impact
assessments, published alongside the legislative proposals in
March this year, ignore crucial findings of earlier studies.

Cost estimates

In 2010 the company Unisys
provided a cost analysis to the European Commission, for which
it said "all cost values should be considered a median
value, considering circa 25% as confidence range, plus or minus"
- that is, the costs could be up to a quarter lower or higher.

The Commission failed
to report on this margin of error in any subsequent reports which
reproduced the Unisys estimates, and instead states that cost
estimates for the EES and RTP were based on "'maximum value'
estimates within a reasonable range meaning that the costs were
calculated so that they should not overrun the budget in any
circumstances."

This optimism is not borne
out by examples of similar systems from other countries. In the
US, the US-VISIT (Visitor and Immigration Status Indicator Technology)
system was initially supposed to record the entry and exit of
visa applicants and other selected foreign nationals, but followed
a series of technical and organisational problems costs overran
significantly and it now records only a limited number of entries
and exits.

The UK's electronic border
control schemes are supposed to allow the checking of all passengers
against watch lists and also foresee the collection of data from
transport service providers (ferries, flights and trains) on
all travellers entering or leaving the United Kingdom.

While the practicalities
of the systems are somewhat different to the proposed EES and
RTP, the EP study argues that a comparison is worthwhile as in
2011 they suffered "a severe crisis tied to the practical
consequences of introducing more stringent registration of entry
and exit requirements".

This ultimately led to
the abolition of the UKBA as an executive agency of the Home
Office and the resignation of its director, and the beginning
of legal proceedings by the prime contractor Raytheon for damages
in excess of £500 million.

More recently, a report
by the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration
found significant failings in the e-Borders component of the
border checks system. [3]

The EP study argues every
single comparable national initiative has experienced significant
delays and escalating costs, and that the Commission's proposed
smart borders package would be unlikely to avoid a similar fate.

Nevertheless, responding
to questions from EUobserver on questions of cost, the
Commission appeared to treat the establishment of the EES and
RTP as a foregone conclusion: "the precise figure would
be known only when the contracts are in place to develop the
systems". [4]

More efficient border
controls?

The EES would require
all non-EU nationals to have their fingerprints recorded in a
database, in order to improve identity verification and ostensibly
to speed up border crossing times. The Commission has argued
that the introduction of an EES would speed up the process by
automating many of the processes currently undertaken manually
by border guards.

A 2008 feasibility study
produced by Unisys estimated that with an EES border crossings
would take 35 seconds for visa holders, 26 seconds for those
exempt from having visas and 15 seconds for EU citizens, and
described these numbers as "plausible".

A Commission survey of
EU Member States in 2009, meanwhile, found that "the average
time at air borders on entry for visa holders is 1 minute 44
seconds, for visa exempt nationals 1 minute 3 seconds and for
EU citizens 15 seconds". Despite the massive increase in
border crossing times these figures represent, the Commission
"made no attempt to reassess any of the models used in the
feasibility study".

The proposals are still
using figures modelled on the acquisition of four fingerprints
from visa-exempt third country nationals, despite the fact that
the Commission has proposed taking ten fingerprints. If this
is taken into account in the models used by the Commission to
demonstrate the effectiveness of the EES, it "substantially
increases the time it takes the majority of TCNs to enter the
EU".

The RTP is also supposed
to speed up border crossings by allowing the "pre-vetting"
of travellers registered with the scheme, thus side-stepping
the need for lengthy checks at the border itself. Automated Border
Crossing (ABC) points would be used to allow registered travellers
to pass onto EU territory.

The Commission has argued
that this would speed up the process, but the 2008 Unisys feasibility
study "actually suggested that the crossing times for members
of the RTP would be longer than for non-members entering through
the manual EES".

The Commission has never
explained the discrepancy between the findings of the feasibility
study and its own claims, and the EP study notes that "no
actual use case models demonstrating how the proposed EU RTP
will benefit its member relative to the EES have ever been produced."

Evaluation of existing
systems required

The problems with the
EES and RTP are compounded by the fact that two major EU databases
aimed either partially or wholly at immigration control - the
Schengen Information System II (SIS II) and the Visa Information
System (VIS) - only came into use in the last two years, and
have not yet had their functioning evaluated.

The study argues that
the functioning of these systems should be assessed before any
new initiatives are launched, a point that has also been made
by the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS). In July this
year, the EDPS argued that:

"An EES should
not be created before a thorough evaluation of existing systems
can be performed, in order to ensure consistency and avoid repeating
difficulties already encountered in the past."

He also stated that as
the legislative proposals stand, they "do not fully meet
the requirements of Article 8(2) ECHR [European Convention on
Human Rights] in relation to necessity and proportionality."
[5]

Given its findings, the
EP study makes a number of recommendations to the European Parliament,
which is yet to debate the proposals. It argues that:

Parliament's Civil Liberties
Committee (LIBE) should recommend suspension of discussions on
the EES and RTP until the European Commission produces a report
on the functioning of SIS II and VIS;

The LIBE Committee should
request a new feasibility study explicitly addressing lessons
that can be learnt from past and ongoing initiatives, such as
those in the UK and US;

The LIBE Committee should
demand a technical feasibility study for the EES and RTP from
the EU Agency for Large-Scale IT Systems before resuming discussions
on the legislative proposals;

"The costing of
the smart borders measures is no longer credible" and LIBE
should demand that the costing analysis be redone;

The RTP should be subject
to a full reassessment that takes into account the possibility
of establishing local RTP schemes, and the costs incurred to
Member States' consulates by processing RTP applications.

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